


Small Harbor

by dearcaspian



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Mazelinka is mentioned but makes no actual appearance, Mostly fluff though, Short One Shot, mentions of the red plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 11:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14933280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearcaspian/pseuds/dearcaspian
Summary: Julian exhaled, turning over to his other side, still stiff from sleep.“I’m starting to think that second bottle was a bad idea,” he mumbled. “Why do you let me make these kinds of mistakes?”No one answered. He opened his eyes wider and the room came into a sharp focus. The space beside him was empty, sheets mussed and devoid of any warmth.“Yvenne?” He sat up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed quicker than he should have. “Yvenne?”





	Small Harbor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleAprilFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleAprilFlowers/gifts).



He did not know hands could be so soft. Gloves kept the disease away - he knew this as a burden of medical fact, but they also kept him at a distance. During the height of the red plague’s reign, he had become so used to the sensation of roughened palms gripping his own beneath the protection of fabric, brittle nails bruised and sloughing off, a visible countdown to an end. He would wonder: did the dying want the warm touch of skin over unfeeling leather. Did it matter?

In this line of work, people were not forgiving in the way they reacted to him. Hands pushed away instead of reached out, disillusioned by the fever’s monstrous deformation of his cloaked figure leaning over the bed. He arrived to them a false savior, dispensing doubtful hope, departing always with their pleading etched into the air around him.

The touch of another was not typically given in kindness to him. No patient wanted to face the doctor bringing them inevitable news of their own slow dissipation into the afterlife’s embrace, and often wriggled and scratched while he administered what little medicine there was available to numb the terminal effects. The touch of a lover beneath the blanket of black skies and crooked beds was even less thoughtful; for no companion readily welcomed the contagion of someone bloodied by the presence of the near-dead.

Rough grasps pulling deep into his hair or thumbs digging pink indents against the dip of a collarbone were most of what erratic affection he experienced. It was all he could get and he would be damned if he settled for the more crippling prospect of lying awake smothered by his shortcomings at night. It suited him, he began to think, rowdy as the taverns he visited and painful like the assurances of inescapable eradication he delivered to Vesuvian homes on a daily basis, long and haunting mask acting as a herald for his visits before he crossed the threshold of the door.

It was enjoyable to an extent. After a while, he often found himself longing for what he might find in the brush of a fingertip along the side of his jaw, or the warmth of another’s body still there when he woke up the next morning, always and perpetually alone in the end of it. They never stayed, and he never expected them to. On occasion, he let himself wish for it anyways.

Her hands were different. She never gripped, never yanked, never once showed any display of the strength he knew lay within her capable form in a way that felt threatening. She was not threatening. He was weary of most people in a way that often hid itself behind bravado and leering grins, sharper teeth than the knives they usually ended up pointing at him in situations he purposefully let get out of control. She was capable in a way he didn’t imagine at the start, sure, but she wasn’t familiar with knives in any manner beyond dicing herbs.

Her hands coddled. Her hands caressed. Her fingers swept and skimmed and tickled sometimes behind his ears. Her touch was a type of clemency, was much like the rest of her, effortless and hopeful, and liberal in the tenderness she would pour upon him. In the shadows of the shop front at night his appearance was met with brimming excitement, avid kisses and hopeful sighs he could willingly reciprocate until he lost the meaning of language against her mouth, the relinquishment of a sweet kind of temperance. She enticed where others had wrenched, the embodiment of a dizzying generosity he had not felt in a long time.

Kindness was natural, but a long line of trials and exposure had hardened the edges of his benevolence. He was kind where he could be, always striving through the guilt to be better in those places he knew were damaged. She seemed to understand. Faults were not ignored but rather empathized with and celebrated, a type of human connection he had perilously little involvement with. She brought out a level of compassion in him which only made him want to indulge her further. Her presence was a near constant source of light, spreading optimism within his days and warmth in the nights.

She visited him even when she shouldn’t have. The city seemed to seek her out for him during those rare times when he wasn’t looking. And through all his mistakes, she never left him before the morning came.

Until she did.

Julian awoke to the sound of the neighbor’s chickens clucking animatedly through the half open window. Many times he had asked Mazelinka if they would notice the slow and eventual complete disappearance of their feathered nuisances. The answer was always yes, but that didn’t stop him from dreaming of a future where he could wake up in peaceful silence, chicken-less and unirritated before he could fully process the world.

The lingering effects of his second bottle of bitters blurred the corners of reality. Yawning, he allowed his senses to rouse of their own accord. Light danced in thick channels across the tiny room. For once he had fallen asleep on the ground floor, something Mazelinka didn’t seem to mind as much as he thought she would. Likely this was because he hadn’t been alone, and while one tall man might have fit nicely in that space down the ladder, two slightly intoxicated people and their sprawling limbs would have done rather poorly against the cramped walls and narrow cot.

Mazelinka had a soft spot for Yvenne in a way Julian couldn’t have predicted. She never made note of her fondness directly, but tended to sneak sweets and tiny trinkets into the apprentice’s bag when she wasn’t looking, only to later vehemently deny any knowledge of how they had gotten there. She never refused Yvenne a place for the night whenever she appeared at the door with Julian, ushering them both in with a gentle thwack across the shoulders for sneaking around where guards could catch them. Yvenne herself was more subtle about her feelings in return, but Julian knew she enjoyed the old woman’s strange company, too.

Julian exhaled, turning over to his other side, still stiff from sleep.

“I’m starting to think that second bottle was a bad idea,” he mumbled. “Why do you let me make these kinds of mistakes?”

No one answered. He opened his eyes wider and the room came into a sharp focus. The space beside him was empty, sheets mussed and devoid of any warmth.

“Yvenne?” He sat up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed quicker than he should have. Groaning, he brushed mussed curls from his eye. “Yvenne?”

Still, no answer was forthcoming. After stretching furiously in a way he would not have liked anyone to see, he got dizzily to his feet. The silence throughout the small house was almost overbearing. There was no shuffling of feet from the kitchen or the cheerful bubble of stew on the stove.

Julian swallowed nervously, eye alighting on a note left by the front door. He crossed the room slowly, headache throbbing in time with his steps. “Stupid,” he said to himself, rubbing the back of his head as if it would soothe the knot there.

The note was clearly in Mazelinka’s harried scrawl, barely legible to anyone who hadn’t developed a hard-earned talent for deciphering her letters.

 _Be back by noon_ , it said. _Gone to gather herbs. Don’t do anything stupid, slippery boy._

Julian smiled, placing the note gently back where he found it. His amused affection slipped away seconds after. No mention of Yvenne had been given in the message.

This did not necessarily mean anything, he tried to reason with himself, gazing around at an unexpected loss. She could be right outside, about to step back indoors with that excited, bright grin on her lips he had grown so foolishly used to. The night before they had laid out plans for this day together. Although their musings had been under the effects of a particularly strong drink, he didn’t believe she would have forgotten them entirely.

Back to the shop, perhaps? This too made little sense. Asra was in town for the moment, so Yvenne would have no pressing need to be there. The palace was an even less likely location. With preparations for the coming Masquerade, the Countess was so busy as to give Yvenne some leniency for her comings and goings, as far as Julian’s own attempted persecution was concerned.

A kind of harried fervency simmered low in his stomach, sickly, leaden. There was a third possibility the corners of his mind wished to lend unpleasant odds to, if he allowed those obscure silhouettes from the past to come forward: a hundred other similar situations, cold blankets and empty gazes looking back through the dark as they walked out the door.

Yvenne wouldn’t leave. She had never left before.

Julian sighed, deep and unsettled. She must have just gone out. Since there was no company here perhaps it would be best if he went to find her, in case something, irrational or otherwise, had happened.

He pulled his black cloak from where he had been tossed to the floor at some point early that morning. There was nothing about to cover his face, but in this lower part of the city it didn’t matter. The people here gave little thought to who he was or what atrocity he might have committed.

Once out in the streets, his misgivings felt heightened, bristling at his feet while he walked.  The sun was hot already, beating mercilessly on his thick coat. Familiar faces nodded in his direction. One or two called out to him, waving in a manner which made it clear they put no faith into what the Countess believed of his actions. He waved back halfheartedly. The roughened spaces around him were in full swing, people passing by in pursuit of seedy business he often knew more of than he would let on. Voices drifted up from the community theater entrance as he passed. Their faint laughter only served to alienate his mood further from the life bustling about him, dragging his thoughts down into a pit he was attempting to desperately crawl his way out of.

She was nowhere to be seen. His quick steps carried him out of Vesuvia’s poorer sections into the wider paths and friendlier faces. Still, he found no sight of her. Here he blended in smoothly among the growing crowds, another body off to another destination. Not a second glance was afforded to him. He gave a passing thanks to the anonymity that walking openly into the tangle of hundreds of people provided.

As he began to realize he had traveled twice in a wide circle, spiralling towards Vesuvia’s main marketplace, a royal azure head of hair, intimately known and glinting brightly in the sunlight, caught his eye.

She stood near the bread seller’s booth, chatting animatedly, a wrapped pumpkin loaf tucked securely into her satchel. The same clothes she had worn last night draped elegantly from her shoulders, smooth and unsullied. Relief, bitter and overwhelming, fell heavily to the earth around him. In the fresh glow of early morning she was more lovely than he had ever seen her, effervescent, ethereal, brimming with a subtle magic he couldn’t see but one day hoped to understand.

She turned before he moved. Across the distance he saw his name forming on her lips, desire to call out evenly matched with the reluctance to bring attention to where he stood. Long braid flying behind her, he watched, dumbfounded by an onslaught of unidentifiable sentiment, as she dodged passerby and made her way nimbly through the crowd until she collided into him.

“Ilya,” Yvenne hissed, too surprised by his presence to be truly agitated. She was grinning up at him despite herself, squinting against the sun. “Why are you here, out in _broad daylight_?”

“I was worried,” he said, admittance tumbling out in a rush. “You and Mazelinka were gone. I thought…”

He trailed off. Yvenne drew him to her, pulling gently at the edges of his coat.

“You could have waited,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be awake so soon. People could _see you here_ , Ilya. What if there’s guards nearby?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

She swatted him. “That’s not comforting.”

Her embrace felt as if she was trying to shield him from the potential eyes of onlookers. Guiltily, he kissed the top of her head, an apology straining in his throat but unable to properly form.

“I thought you had, uh, I thought-” he tried once more. Yvenne pulled back, eyeing him curiously.

“That something had happened to me?” she asked. “I’m capable enough for-”

“Oh no, no,” he backtracked hurriedly. “That’s not what I mean at all.”

She continued to stare up at him, patient in a way he didn’t deserve.

“I thought you left.”

“I was coming back, you know,” she said, reaching up briefly to trail a finger across the side of his face.

“No,” he mumbled. “I thought you had _left_.”

“Left? As in leave you?” She was incredulous at the subtle connotations the word carried, laughing before she could properly finish the sentence.

Julian frowned. Yvenne tightened her grip around him, standing on the tips of her toes.

“Of course I wouldn’t leave,” she said, laughter dissipating into sincerity, her cheek resting against his chest. “I thought I’d surprise you with fresh bread.”

“Oh.”

“You know I mean it, right?” she told him. “I’m not leaving after today. I’m not leaving next week, I’m not going anywhere after we clear your name and you can walk the city as a free man. Okay?”

“Okay,” Julian said softly. “Okay.”

There were her hands - gentle, pressed comfortingly on his back, a soft and small harbor he clung to in a self-built storm. In the center of the bustling market he couldn’t care any less who caught sight of him, so long as she held him until he was reminded, again and again, she was there to stay.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written as a fill for a prompt given by the wonderful LittleAprilFlowers, also ferelden-loser on tumblr, where it was posted originally! Yvenne belongs solely to her!


End file.
